Top-down government breeds irresponsible individuals, and the confiscation of civil society by the state leads to a widespread refusal among the citizens to act for themselves.
Through sacred things we can influence and be influenced by the transcendental.
The main point, it seems to me, is to maintain a life of active risk and affection, while helping the body along the path of decay, remembering always that the value of life does not consist in its le...
The greatest modern philosopher was moved by nothing more than by duty. His life, in consequence, was unremarkable.
The doctrine of Original sin, which is contained in the story of Genesis – one of the most beautiful concentrated metaphors in existence – is about the way we human beings fall from treating each othe...
The disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. Being the opposite of xenophobia...
The assault on the human world in the name of science is more pseudo-science than science, and rejoices in its bald, unmoralised image of 'what we really are'.What we really are from the scientific po...
The ascent of the soul through love, which Plato describes in the Phaedrus, is symbolized in the figure of Aphrodite Urania, and this was the Venus painted by Botticelli, who was incidentally an arden...
Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to liv...
So conceived, the English police force served to emphasize a fundamental truth about the English law, which is that it exists not to control the individual but to free him. The
Smith emphasized that trust, responsibility and accountability exist only in a society that respects them, and only where the spontaneous fruit of human sympathy is allowed to ripen. It is where sympa...
Our national jurisdictions are now bombarded by laws from outside, even though hardly any of these laws are concerned with the avoidance of war. We, the citizens, are powerless in the matter, and they...
Observing the volatile nature of the new democracies, I came vividly to see how unimportant a part of democracy are elections, in comparison with the enduring institutions and public spirit that make...
Nonsemes and mathemes stand next to each other in detached and mutually irrelevant jumbles. They lack the crucial valency that ties sentence to sentence in a truth-directed argument or formula to form...
Moreover, in discussing tradition, we are not discussing arbitrary rules and conventions. We are discussing answers that have been discovered to enduring questions. These answers are tacit, shared, em...
Jack regarded himself as locked in a lifelong struggle with this establishment, on behalf of the Anglo-Saxon peasantry whose birthright had been stolen a thousand years earlier by the Norman knights.
In The Theory of the Moral Sentiments, Smith emphasized that trust, responsibility and accountability exist only in a society that respects them, and only where the spontaneous fruit of human sympathy...
I think we can all see the force of the idea that there are certain things that cannot be done to human beings – certain basic goods, including life itself, that cannot be taken away from them unless...
I arrived at the house, after walking through those silent and deserted streets, in which the few who stood seemed occupied on some dark official business, and in which party slogans and symbols disfi...
Hence we inevitably see ourselves from outside, as others see us, and seek for their approval and sympathy, which is the greatest of social goods.